My favorite satire site started the day with this headline: “Man Starting to Wonder if He Shouldn’t Have Invested His Life Savings in an Imaginary Token Saying He Owns a Digital Painting of a Cartoon Monkey.” Another great post from earlier this week announced, “Crypto Investor Can Still Afford Imaginary Cryptofood and Pretend Cryptocar.”

That was in response to the recent crash of cryptocurrency valuations, which was seeded last month when the Federal Reserve began constricting liquidity to fight inflation.

The collapse of valuations of Bitcoin (which I prefer to call Bit-con) and other majors has dire implications for holders of the approximately 19,000 cryptos on dozens of blockchain platforms. The concern has been front and center at The Wall Street Journal and other financial publications. According to the Journal, “A Crypto Bankruptcy Could Be Investors’ Nightmare,” and “Crypto Investors Are Spooked,” leading its financial analysts to ask, “Who Pays for Crypto’s Collapse?”

Bloomberg warns, “There’s Something Different about this Bitcoin Drawdown,” and Market Watch notes, “These three metrics show how bad the carnage is, and what to expect next.”

What are cryptocurrencies? If you are under 30 or have had college kids in your family over the last decade, you are likely familiar with cryptos. In short, they are valuations given to digital or virtual holdings maintained on ledgers called blockchains, and they gained followers because transactions with “digital currencies” are private.

In other words, they are valuations given to numeric formulations that actually have no intrinsic value and, ironically, are denominated in dollars. Ironic, as well, because fiat currencies are worth only as much as the holder’s confidence in that currency’s value.

Cryptos are nothing but air, but if speculators want to formulate a value for a cubic foot of air and trade it back and forth, that is fine. Kinda reminds me of the so-called “carbon credit” scams to offset “climate change.”

Likewise, you can call crap on a canvas “art” and fashionable collectors will spend a fortune for it. Just ask the heir-apparent to Joe Biden’s crime syndicate, renowned producer of masterpieces Hunter Biden. Some of his “art” sold for upwards of $500,000 — maybe they were purchased with Bitcoins.

It’s still crap but at least it is tangible crap — all in the eye of the beholder.

I have been fascinated by the pseudo-intellectual arguments for cryptos and their shady promoters, thus I have endured several marketing videos for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. The closest comparison I can make to the cultish crypto marketing language and attraction is that it’s akin to the lunacy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology cult, with a dash of cult Astrology thrown in for mass appeal.

The cultish “belief” in the value of these digital frauds is precisely why I have declared that crypto is the intersectional currency of Scientology and Astrology. Crypto-heads, the “true believers,” have driven the price of this vacuous digital void up and down for years, but the seductive digital chatter is still just digital chatter.

So, why does the digital crash matter? Because unlike other markets of tangible investments and products, there are no guardrails for crypto investors.

Its high mark valuation last year of $2.9 trillion has now tanked to about $1 trillion. That is a big drop in the price of pretend digital currency, and crypto investors are taking big financial hits that will have a domino effect in some other markets of real and tangible goods. But hey, the price of nothing will probably go back up tomorrow!

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776